Present Perfect

2010-2-2712:52 pm

My latest Amazon order arrived at work. One of the books was the Doolittle book in the 33 1/3 series. For those who don’t know, this series dissects an album track by track and tells stories about the recording. The first one I read was on Afghan Whigs’s “Gentlemen”, for obvious reasons.

These books tend to be a little top-heavy, saying less about the band and more about the reviewer, and they can be hit-and-miss because a lot depends on the actual writer/journalist. It seems the band remembers little about making the album. Two things stick after reading this one:

Apparently I’m as prone to mishearing lyrics as anyone else. This book tells me that the first lines of La La Love You are “Shake your butt / Not too hard”. All my life I’ve been hearing that as “Take the bus! Not the car!” Somehow I’m going to keep preferring mine, although I have to admit shake your butt makes more sense in the context of the song.

If you’ re doing a 100+ page book on Doolittle, how on earth do you manage to not talk at all about the hidden mini-album in Doolittle that you get when you play the tracks as numbered in the CD booklet ? Gouge away/Mr. Grieves/Dead/Wave of Mutilation/Tame/Hey/I Bleed/Monkey gone to Heaven tell a very different story than the main album. If there’s one question I’d ask mr. Thompson about Doolittle, it would have been about this one…

The book was written before the recent Doolittle tour, as it mentions Silver has never been played live by the band. Which I’m going to assume was correct before that tour since I have no bootleg evidence to the contrary…